Google: “9/11 showed…”
Filed in: Iraq, lists, Fri, Mar 28 2003 19:56 PT
One of my least favorite lines of argument in recent times is “September 11th showed…”. It sounds to me like a trump card when it’s used, a shallow attempt at co-opting the meaning of the events of that day, a boatload of fallacies (bandwagon, appeal to consequences, post hoc, hasty generalization, wishful thinking) wrapped up in an easy-to-carry bundle. I found it most recently in a treatise advocating American aggression in hawk-friendly Foreign Policy magazine.
So I wanted to see how many people have tried this approach, and the top 4 permutations total over 3600 hits on Google, or just under seven new things 9/11 has shown us per day. If you throw in what 9/11 “taught” us, the figure jumps to over 5000, or around nine lessons per day. And you pesky foreign types say we Americans never learn stuff!
- “September 11th showed”: 545 hits
- “September 11th taught”: 332 hits
- “September 11 showed”: 1810 hits
- “September 11 taught”: 635 hits
- “9/11 showed”: 805 hits
- “9/11 taught”: 390 hits
- “11 September showed”: 478 hits
- “11 September taught”: 48 hits